UPDATE 10:21 a.m: This post has been updated to include more context around the allegation against Clifton and comment from Judd Legum, Clifton’s editor at the time.
White House aide Sebastian Gorka on Tuesday addressed reports that the medal he wore to one of President Donald Trump’s inaugural balls was associated with a Nazi ally by alleging that the journalist who first surfaced the story was “fired for antiSemitism.”
Eli Clifton noted in a post for LobeLog that Gorka had worn a medal identified with Miklós Horthy, an anti-Semitic World War II-era leader whose regime oversaw the murder of some 600,000 Hungarian Jews. In a tweet, Gorka pointed to a Breitbart News article falsely alleging that Clifton, who he referred to as his “attacker,” was forced out of his position at the Center for American Progress because of his writings on Israel:
Grateful 2 Jewish fmr colleague 4 setting record straight
How ironic my attacker allegedly fired for antiSemitismhttps://t.co/N2ZEpvHh28
— Sebastian Gorka PhD (@SebGorka) February 14, 2017
The Breitbart story linked to a 2012 Jerusalem Post article alleging that Jewish groups found the writing of Clifton and other journalists working for CAP’s blog, Think Progress, to be “infected with Jew-hatred and discriminatory policy positions toward Israel.”
In reality, Clifton got caught up in an intramural fight over the limits of acceptable criticism of Israel within the mainstream Democratic Party. Few reasonable observers thought there was any legitimate claims that the writers in question were anti-Semitic. Think Progress founder and editor-in-chief Judd Legum, who was Clifton’s editor at the time, confirmed to TPM in an email that he was not fired.
Gorka worked as national security editor at Breitbart and as a self-proclaimed counterterrorism expert in Washington, D.C. before joining the Trump administration in late January.
Both Clifton and TPM published stories this week looking into the medal Gorka wore to the Liberty Ball, one of several inaugural balls, which some Hungarian scholars identified with a knightly order of merit founded by Horthy. The Hungarian leader, who oversaw the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz, according to the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, has regained popularity in recent years as an icon for that country’s ultranationalist far-right.
A White House spokeswoman did not respond to TPM’s multiple requests to make Gorka available to comment on the significance of the medal. He has yet to respond publicly to reports about it beyond his Tuesday tweet, which thanked his “Jewish fmr colleague,” Breitbart senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak, for “setting the record straight.”
Pollak’s article does not offer any explanation for why Gorka wore the medal, either. Instead, it accuses he “left and the mainstream media” of attempting to “smear” Gorka as a “Nazi sympathizer” in order to undermine the Trump administration.
Pollak argues that the media should have read Gorka’s writings, looked at his public views, or consulted his former Breitbart News colleagues to learn that he is actually “pro-Jewish.”
“Speaking personally as an Orthodox Jew, it was an honor to work alongside him for years as he wrote about foreign policy and national security,” he wrote.
Breitbart, a “reliable source?” Rely on them to publish fiction.
The Projection Presidency, the Potemkin Presidency, the QVC/HSN Presidency…the Trump weeks will be known by many names in the future.
His former zombie friends at the Breitbart charnel house defending him…gotta be fake news. Personally I think Gorka looked like Baron Rolfe Von Stuppe from “The Great Race” in his uniform. Say, wasn’t that a masquerade ball?
Written like a true kapo.